NIA CHARLESTOWN NEVIS (June 02, 2022) – Premier Hon. Mark Brantley, Senior Minister of Health in the Nevis Island Administration (NIA), is urging members of the public to exercise caution in light of the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases on the island.

Despite Nevis recording over 40 cases over the past few weeks, the Premier assured that health official are monitoring the situation.

“Nevis has had a sudden surge in COVID-19 cases. The last number I saw I believe we had just over 40 active cases. This is alarming for us because we have not had any cases in quite some time and the only cases that we did register were persons who were visitors.

“These are locally grown cases in the sense that they have no travel history, so we are uncertain as to where that surge might have come from. But we are aware that there was a particular event and from that event quite a few cases emerged and so we had one event which accounted for the majority of those cases.”

He said the majority of these positive cases were traced to a mass event held on the island recently. Most of those testing positive reported mild to no symptoms, however one individual had to be hospitalised.

The Premier informed that several members of staff at the Alexandra Hospital had tested positive, creating a shortage of staff at the island’s main health facility.

“So there is at this point no need for alarm. What I will say however is that we have had the unfortunate situation where a few doctors and quite a few nurses have come down with COVID and so that has put some pressure on us at the hospital. I believe that the Junior Minister of Health, Hon. Hazel Brandy-Williams advised the Cabinet [on May 25] that they had gone back to 12-hour shifts at the hospital because of the short staff occasioned by the fact that a few have COVID.

“I’ve been keeping tabs on it with Dr. [Judy Nisbett]…We are hopeful that this is a spike. COVID is still out there. We continue to ask our people to be careful, to wear their masks as much as possible and of course we continue to encourage people to get vaccinated. It is still the best protection that we have against COVID…

“So I feel that the situation as I speak appears to be under control and we are hopeful that we don’t have any other spikes and we start to record recoveries from those individuals,” he stated.

According to the Nevis COVID-19 Dashboard for Wednesday, June 01, 2022, four new cases had been reported in the past 24 hours, and one recovered case. As at that date there were 37 active COVID-19 cases on Nevis.